In the preparation of electronic documents, multiple users often collaborate on a single document. For example, in certain industrial environments, multiple individuals may be responsible for entering or maintaining data in varying sections of a single electronic document.
Typically, such an electronic document is distributed to the multiple users. Each of the users updates the section of the document for which they have responsibility. After each of the users performs their update, all of the updates must be consolidated into a single version of the electronic document. The task of consolidating the updates is often tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone.
An alternative approach is to distribute a single electronic document to the users, one user at a time. In such a scenario, after one user completes their update, the updated electronic document is provided to another user, and so on, until each of the users has been able to update their respective section of the document. This approach is undesirably time-consuming, as each of the users waits for their turn to access the electronic document. Further, because each user updates their respective portion of the electronic document at a different time, the finished document may not reflect the present status of the data included in the document.